I was absolutely floored; I was Googling my Wedding Directory site using the allinurl:www.website.com and I found six other websites that showed up in the results as being part of my site. The allinurl will show you what internal pages Google has indexed for your site, and I had recently added a bunch of new pages to the site and was curious if Google had indexed them yet. As soon as I clicked on those offending links I noticed that the pages were redirected almost instantly to another site. But the kicker was it was my Wedding site framed inside their site. With Google adsense ads floating around. Where ever you moved your mouse the ads would follow. I have been working on my Wedding Directory site for years, I have more then 800 wedding professionals listed on the site. The last thing I wanted or needed was this to happen. After trying to contact the site owners, which of course was useless I stared looking for ways to stop them, and also figure out how they where able to do it. The first place I went to was "Search Engine Watch" forums. A favorite haunt of mine, and a great place to learn insider secrets to all things SEO related. I was amazed to find out that this has been going on for a really long time. I found out that my site was being 302 hijacked. What is 302 jacking? 302 redirects tell the search engines your site, or page, has moved temporarily to another site and to credit the content of your site to their site and thus stealing your PR. I also found out that Google is very aware of it, but either can not, or will not do anything about it. That is until you report the offending sites to Google using the spam report form. More research revealed that more then likely my website content was being stolen using a PHP script (name with held) and the use of DMOZ's data feeds. DMOZ - The Open Directory Project for years has been the goal of many aspiring webmasters to get listed in this highly coveted directory, with people waiting years to get listed in it. Google pulls results from DMOZ and getting listed in their directory really helps boost a websites listing with them. My wedding directory has been in there for many years now. But with DMOZ opening up their directory like this to any and all takers who want to abuse the data-feed like that, I am not so sure I want to be in there any more. Google claims that there is "Almost Nothing" a competitor can do to affect your rankings with them. Notice how they phrase this as "Almost Nothing". 302 hijacking is just one of the ways that a competitor can effect your rankings. Another is stealing your website content and using it on their websites. The search engines hate duplicate content, there are documented cases of low life webmasters that will use a competitors website content on multiple URL's and then direct links from those sites to their main. Just a guess but I bet there main intent was to get quick easy links to their main site from theme related sites, quickly with out actually having to put any effort into creating their own original content. Google's filters are efficient enough today to figure out when this happens, and they penalize everyone involved. There are copyright laws that will protect the original website owner but this may very well take weeks or months to resolve. These ruthless people are using false Whois information, and no contact info on their websites. While this is against most web hosting companies Terms Of Service agreement it still takes time to get in touch with the hosting company and have them pull the offending site down. You can also report your stolen content to Google using there spam report, as well as other major search engines. They will most likely lose their Adsense accounts, that is if they are using your content with Adsense ads. Lori's web design has put together the most complete up to date listing that I could find on Hijackings with 302 Redirects, meta refresh redirects, no follow meta tags, and other deceptive redirects, and ways to help protect yourself from these forms of attacks. Thank you Lori. It took a few weeks after I submitted a spam report to Google before these sites went away, after they were gone I also installed a javascript that will deframe your website. So now if someone does this, atleast my site will no longer work inside their frames pages. |
